How to find a designer for your 3D Printing project? By Sascha Hosey

Women in 3D Printing’s mission is to increase the visibility of women in the Additive Manufacturing industry and encourage more women to use 3D Printing technologies. We have been doing so by highlighting female leaders and innovators on our platform since 2014. To provide even more insights on female experts in the Additive Manufacturing Industry, we are inviting women to contribute to this series by sharing their business and tech expertise through guest blog posts to be published as Industry Insiders and “How To?” series.

Sascha Hosey is a NYC based wearable art designer, founder of kova by sascha, – creative festival/wedding headgear company based in NYC. Sascha is an avid festival goer. She loves inspiring humanity to be artistic with her artwork.

Let’s talk about sourcing. I first learned about it helping my Grandmother make fur hats: she asked me to sew linings for her fur hats and promised to pay me 3 rubles per each. I was so excited laboring and sewing those linings and at the end, she didn’t pay me…that’s actually an example of child labor, – don’t do that. Maybe she really forgot to pay me and I was too shy to bring it up. After all, she was making and selling those fur hats to buy an apartment for me later.

Fast forward to me having my own 3D printed headpiece business here in the United States and need to outsource things and tasks that I’m not good at or have no skills to do. Where do you turn to? What do you do?

Nowadays there are a plethora of sites that connect 3D modelers/artists to entrepreneurs just like myself that want their ideas to become tangible art.

In my case, I was lucky to know the Russian language because Russian & Ukrainian software engineers, hackers, coders, 3D artists & modelers are considered ones of the best in the World. There’s a marketplace called www.upwork.com where you can post your 3D modeling project, sketches, your budget, select a pool of freelancers (level of skill) and have a flood of proposals (sometimes with samples of work) go into your inbox. It usually takes a bit of searching to find a really talented person for your aesthetic and taste but it might also work from the first time around if you are lucky. Try posting projects at different days and times to get the attention of various freelancers. You can also experiment with fixed budgets or ‘pay by hour’ ones to hire on a continuous basis. We were lucky to have found Andrey Kulikov on Upwork that became our main 3D artist and modeler to date. Andrey modeled Alerio Mohawk without any initial sketches just with our description of the concept and experimenting with shapes and styles in real time on Skype.

Fig. 1. Alerior Mohawk

There’s also some amazing digital art and 3D artists/modelers along with their portfolios on Behance.net. It’s the leading online platform that connects creative professionals and opportunity, which can be your next idea.

You can also find a local freelancer on www.shapeways.com under Designers section but that might cost a bit more. Shapeways is a marketplace to design, prototype, buy and sell 3D printed custom products. Since we’ve started printing with Shapeways kova by sascha has been featured as one of the most creative companies in New Jersey in the talent scouting campaign called “Sparks Across America”.

Fig. 2. Ashur Helmet (original sketch)

Shapeways offers tutorial articles, online shop that designers can create and network with one another and be discovered by potential clients. We’ve found a great 3D artist and modeler through Shapeways that just finished Fashion Institute of Technology at a time and local to New York City, – Vitaliy Feldman. He is also the only 3D modeler we’ve actually personally met. Vitaliy helped us develop, design and model the following projects: Dragon Skeleton Headpiece and Ashur Helmet piece (original sketches shown below).

Fig. 3. Gustavo Dragon Headpiece Sketch

The same goes for finding help with writing for your blog entries, for example, doing your social media updates, building a site on WordPress, graphic design needs, photo editing, etc.

If you’d like to find local freelancers or interns social media networks like Facebook is always very helpful given that you are on facebook and have few active friends there. If not, a mass email to your personal and professional contacts can be helpful as well describing the project in detail and what you are willing to offer. If you use email don’t forget to ask people to forward it to people who might be able to help. I personally use MailChimp service for that.